Page 97 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

Bryan Robson approached Ryan one day to recommend Harry Swales as an agent. He had checked
it with me first. Bryan was coming to the end and was sure Harry was the right man for Giggs. He was
right. Harry is fantastic. Got engaged at 81 to a Swiss lady he met on the platform of a railway station.
She was lost. He is a former sergeant-major with a handlebar moustache. He looked after Ryan really

well. Ryan has a strong mother, too, and his grandparents were very, very good people.
To stretch his first-team career to two decades, Ryan had to develop a meticulous fitness
programme. Yoga, and his preparation routines, were at the root of his longevity. Ryan was religious
about yoga. Twice a week after training, an expert would come in to guide him through the exercises.
That became vital to him. In the days when he was susceptible to hamstring injuries, we were never
sure how much we could play him. His hamstrings were a constant concern. We would leave him out
of games to have him ready for others. By the end, only his age would prompt us to give him a rest.

He would play 35 games a season because his fitness was fantastic.
Ryan’s intelligence helped him make the sacrifices in his social life. He is a reserved kind of guy
but, of all that bunch, he was the one they looked up to. He was the king, the man. There was a brief
period when he and Paul Ince would wear daft suits but it soon passed. Ryan still has the suit that
caused me to blurt, ‘What the hell is that?’
Incey was a fan of flash dressing and he and Giggs were good pals. They were a duo. But Ryan has

led a highly professional life. He is revered around the club, where everyone defers and looks up to
him.
When his pace deteriorated we played him more in the centre of the park. We no longer expected
him to flash round the outside of defenders the way he did as a boy. Not many people noticed that
even in his later incarnation he retained his change of pace, which is sometimes more important than
raw speed. His balance, too, was unaffected.
In the autumn of 2010 he was brought down by West Ham’s Jonathan Spector in the penalty box,

and I seized my chance to set a quiz question. How many penalties had Ryan Giggs won in his
Manchester United career? Answer: five. Because he always stays on his feet. He stumbles but never
goes down. I would ask him, after a heavy foul in the box, why he had declined to go down, which he
would have been entitled to do, and he would look at me as if I had horns. He would wear that vacant
look. ‘I don’t go down,’ he would say.
Ryan is a calm boy, very even-tempered in adversity. Strange to say, he was never a great

substitute until his later years. He was always better starting a game. But he played a great role as a
sub in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow, and against Wigan when we won the League,
coming on to score our second goal. He removed the doubt we had about him being a good impact
player and was an amazing asset to have off the bench.
Giggs turned his back on the fame and the branding; he lacked the temperament for that level of
exposure. His personality was more introverted. To lead that life, you need great energy to be trotting
all over the world and putting your face in front of a camera. It also requires a certain vanity: the

belief that this is what you were made for. You read about actors always knowing they wanted to be
on the stage or in films. I never had that magnetic attraction to fame.
My hope was that players who had grown up with us would carry things on at Carrington and
maintain the continuity, much as Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, say, had at Bayern
Munich. They understand how the club functions and the standard of player needed to keep the show
rolling along. Whether that leads in the end to management cannot be known, because it depends how

the coaching side develops. But Giggs and Scholes are both intelligent men who understand United’s
soul and were great players themselves, so all the right stuff was there.